Monthly Archives: January 2016

Last June, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that the death penalty might be close to its ultimate demise. “Rather than try to patch up the death penalty’s legal wounds one at a time,” he wrote in a dissent to Glossip v. Gross, to which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg added her name, “I would ask for a full briefing on a more basic question: whether the death penalty violates the Constitution.”
. . . Regardless of what case they pick, the justices have many options; they could restrict the death penalty without abolishing it altogether. They could raise the age of who qualifies for the punishment or define more stringent tests for IQ or other indicators of mental ability. They could strike down the laws governing how juries make death decisions in some states1 but not others, or strike down laws keeping information about execution drugs secret. They could restrict the death penalty to the most heinous crimes, such as mass acts of terrorism or killing a police officer or prison guard. Read the article: The Marshall Project

ST. LOUIS, Mo. (MissouriNet) — A man whose death sentence was thrown out in November will be retried for the 1991 murders of two sisters on the Chain of Rocks Bridge in St. Louis.

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer M. Joyce says she will retry 44-year-old Reginald Clemons for the murders of Julie and Robin Kerry, and says she will seek the death penalty against him. She is also filing charges of forcible rape and first-degree robbery. Continue reading

Three wrongfully convicted exonerees share their stories about adjusting to life on the outside after decades in prison. All of them say the scars of confinement will never leave them. Some of them have been compensated by the state for the injustice that came to them. One of them, Ken Ireland, now serves on Connecticut’s parole board, the irony of which is not lost on him. CBS News: 60 Minutes

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declared Florida’s death penalty law unconstitutional because it requires the trial judge and not the jury to make the critical findings necessary to impose capital punishment.Continue reading: NBC News